I'm a noob. Hi there.

[Chad Walker]

Hi everyone. Just discovered "BiggerPockets" and am excited to start devouring the content. I've listened to a few of the podcasts and the hosts have mentioned how important it is to take advantage of the forum.  So here I am.  Although my wife and I have purchased two homes, they've been as primary residences.  Both were purchased in California.  The first was purchased in 2005 and sold in 2010.  We were fortunate to get out of the house unscathed.  We came very close to breaking even, which isn't great, but considering the impact on a lot of the country, we were happy with the outcome.  We had better luck with our second home.  We got our hands on a short sale just before the market began to recover.  

  We had never really considered real estate as part of our investment strategy.  The reason that changed is that my wife's father passed away, leaving my wife and her sister a small 90 acre farm in Illinois.  Initially the plan was to hold onto it and simply split the annual crop revenue down the middle.  Unfortunately, as is frequently the case with inheritance, each of them have very different ideas about how the farm would be managed.  Rather than create tension between the two of them, we decided to put the land up for sale, and split the proceeds.  We aren't too excited about paying the capital gains, so it's time to get our feet wet with investment property.

My wife is getting her P.H.D at Case Western and we will realistically be here for a few more years.  That means we will probably be purchasing multi family homes in East Cleveland.  My real estate investing knowledge is non existent at this point.  I'm hoping that through the wealth of information on BiggerPockets and the wisdom of the investors on this forum, I can move forward competently.  Not to kiss up to the admins too much, but from what I've seen so far, BiggerPockets looks to be an invaluable resource.  I'm actually starting to get excited about investing in real estate!  Hopefully once we acquire a few places I'll have some insights of my own to share.

Looking forward to the journey!